Homeschool Diaries 2016: Recap of the First Four Weeks

Last month, I shared what our homeschooling set up is for this year. We are now on our fifth week and so I thought I’d do a recap of what transpired during the first four weeks.

I’m pleased to share that all is good in our preschool homeschool journey so far. The weekly homeschool planner that I designed has been instrumental to keeping us organized. I usually plan out two weeks worth of lessons at a time and that has worked really well for us especially in keeping track of our progress.

Ziggy actually has 7 subjects this year including Language, Reading, Filipino, Writing, Math, Science and MAPE. I”m so proud to say that we’re already done studying all four Science lessons required for the first quarter of the school year. This is great because that leaves us more time to dedicate to more difficult subjects. In Ziggy’s case, that means Filipino.

To help with our Filipino lessons, we have enrolled him in Beginning Filipino classes under The Learning Library. He just had his first class yesterday. Although each class only takes an hour, we have to go to the center three times a week and so I’ve had to adjust our homeschooling schedule at home. It hasn’t been a problem so far but we’ll see what happens in the next several weeks.

Today though, I’d like to share with you some of the activities we’ve done so far. I’ve posted some of them on social media and I’ve received questions about where I get the ideas and materials from so I thought I’d share them with you. Before that, let me just say that the activities I choose for Ziggy are usually related to the topics we’re discussing for the week. Ziggy’s a kinesthetic learner, which means he learns better by experiencing things, being active and doing things as opposed to only reading or hearing about them. So, I chose activities that he can have fun with but at the same time help him remember and understand concepts better.

Here are some of the activities we’ve done so far.

Sorting Largest to Smallest or Smallest to Largest

One of the Math lessons we had was on sizes. I researched and found printable cards that will help your kid sort photos of items from largest to smallest or smallest to largest. I found these card printables via MontessoriMom.com. It actually comes with a printable board too which your kid can use as well to compare sizes but although I downloaded it, I decided not to use it anymore for this particular instance.

I love the Montessori way of learning and think that it’s the best way to teach Ziggy, so I’m planning on using more Montessori activities in the future.

Learning Opposites

We subscribed to the Toddler version of the Buribox for six months. Although we’ve stopped our subscription already for now, we still have a lot of unused materials from the boxes we’ve collected from them and this activity is one of them. Aside from learning about opposites, this also teaches kids about shapes, sizes and counting.

We love the Buribox but since we’re done with the toddler versions we’d have to transition to their Young Reader version if we want to continue our subscription, which is what we plan to do soon.

HaluHalo Stand

This is another activity sheet from the Buribox. This is actually a counting activity. As you can see below, there’s a number dice. Kids are supposed to pretend that they are selling halo-halo from a stand. They’re supposed to ask their customers which ingredients they want included in their halo-halo. Customers will then throw the dice to determine the amount of such ingredient the kid has to put inside the “glass”.

Domino Flash Cards

Sometimes I get ideas for activities from Ziggy’s own school books, such as this idea on using domino flash cards to foster understanding on numbers and counting. I made two sets of domino flash cards using Powerpoint, printed and cut them to size.

One other idea I got from one of his books is to let Ziggy make photos by gluing different shapes together. It was super time-consuming just drawing and cutting a lot of different shapes. But it was also super worth it because he really enjoyed that activity.

Taking Care of our Teeth

One of our Science lessons involved learning how to take care of ourselves physically. That involves oral hygiene, which is also affected by the types of food that we eat. I researched online and found this activity sheet from PrintableWorksheets.In. The sheet has two columns: one is for a healthy mouth and the other for an unhealthy mouth. Under that are several drawings of different types of food that you can cut out.

Kids are supposed to sort through the cut-outs and choose which types of food are healthy to eat or not and then paste them under the appropriate column.

Personal Hygiene Chart

Another printable I found online that helps teach lessons on taking care of oneself is this Personal Hygiene Chart also from PrintableWorksheets.In. This worksheet has several blank rows and columns that contain days of the week.

On the left most column, kids are supposed to jot down what they need to do in order to keep themselves clean and healthy, such as bathing, brushing their teeth, washing their hands before meals, etc. Then, they’re supposed to track which days of the week they are able to do those things. I had Ziggy update this sheet at the end of every day for one week. It helped make him more aware of whether he has done enough to keep himself clean on a particular day.

Circle Time Songs

I schedule five minutes of circle time each time we start our homeschool session. Circle Time is when we pray, update his chart (including the date, day, weather and time of day) and sing “welcome” songs. I usually pick out one song per week. Doing this helps him memorize the song better compared to using a different song every day.

For this, I also went online to find a list of songs I could use. I found a downloadable PDF file from TeachingMama.org. It contains 8 pages. The file includes one preschool song per page, with lyrics, that are perfect for starting your preschool homeschool day right. Ziggy loves all the five songs we’ve used so far. He loves them so much that he usually asks to sing it several times before we end our Circle Time. Sometimes he ends up singing them in his spare time too.

DepEd Kindergarten Education Resources

I stumbled upon this site, called DepEd Tambayan PH, that provides a lot of information, resources and printables related to the DepEd K-12 curriculum. It includes weekly lesson plans with suggested activities. They even have free ready-made sample exams for periodical tests.

I found the page dedicated for the Kindergarten level very helpful. It gives me ideas on what teachers in regular schools teach and the activities they do that help students have a better understanding of the lessons. You can download the weekly lesson plan but the page also has links to stories, test items, and such, as well as information on the Kindergarten Legal Mandate and the Kindergarten Education Act among others. You can access the Kindergarten Resources here.

I usually research for resources once or twice a week. I still have more on my list that I haven’t included here simply because we haven’t tried them yet. I plan on doing a homeschool update here on the blog at least once a month though so I’ll be sharing the other resources then. Until then, you can follow me on Instagram to see what we do for preschool homeschool each week.

For now, I hope you’ll find this post helpful. If you’re a more seasoned homeschooler, I’d appreciate it if you can share your resources too in the comments below. Thanks!